Clapping a couple of dozen or so soldiers as they marched around the football pitch at a Cardiff City match was nothing unusual last Sunday.

Clapping a couple of dozen or so soldiers as they marched around the football pitch at a Cardiff City match was nothing unusual last Sunday.

If anything it’s become a far too common ritual in this country – at all manner of public events since we started waging wars in far off lands against nebulous enemies.

And it was hard not to be moved by the gaps left behind by the soldiers of the 1st Battalion Welsh Guards who died on their latest tour of duty in Afghanistan.

It was a tangible, depressingly real, illustration in human terms of the abject failure of our foreign policy in the 21st century.

It’s easy to forget that we continue to send young men and women off to fight in the name of our freedom; we have stopped questioning the motives, the reasons and what gains there are from our involvement in these hauntingly irrelevant conflicts.

We bury the consequences of our actions on the communities and people caught up in the crossfire beneath the banalities of our own lives.

Our misguided approach to the way we deal with cultures, people and countries with which we lack any meaningful understanding has no sign of changing – Iran and Syria loom large on the foreign policy horizon.

There will be no u-turn from the political cowardice of military intervention which costs us in vast sums of money and, more importantly, precious lives.

Much of all this is the result of past interventions, past mistakes – past maltreatment of the weak by the powerful.

So Hegel’s sage old truism that “we learn from history that we do not learn from history”, becomes ever more relevant.

Because, our political classes continue to make disastrous mistakes that make the lives of the many worse than they should be.

On Wednesday, George Osborne wormed his way through an Autumn Statement which laid bare the crushing stupidity of the coalition’s omnishambolic economic policy.

It also shined a light on a lack of willingness by all political parties to tell the truth about our perilous economic position: namely, that we should all realise in this finite world, with finite resources, that we are coming to a time when growth in the traditional sense will become an impossibility.

The unattainable carrot of infinite economic expansion continues to be disingenuously dangled before us.

It will take real bravery to admit the age of greedy consumerism is coming to its end. It will take no little imagination, original thinking and great statesmanship to come up with an alternative.

Sadly any political bravery is in short supply at present. And that is a fact the men and women of our armed forces have bore the brunt of for too many years.

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